This survey covers rollback-recovery techniques that do not require special language constructs. In the first part of the survey we classify rollback-recovery protocols into checkpoint-based and log-based.Checkpoint-based protocols rely solely on checkpointing for system state restoration. Checkpointing can be coordinated, uncoordinated, or communication-induced. Log-based protocols combine checkpointing with logging of nondeterministic events, encoded in tuples called determinants. Depending on how determinants are logged, log-based protocols can be pessimistic, optimistic, or causal. Throughout the survey, we highlight the research issues that are at the core of rollback-recovery and present the solutions that currently address them. We also compare the performance of different rollback-recovery protocols with respect to a series of desirable properties and discuss the issues that arise in the practical implementations of these protocols.

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A survey of rollback-recovery protocols in message-passing systems

With the advent of Grid and application technologies, scientists and engineers are building more and more complex applications to manage and process large data sets, and execute scientific experiments on distributed resources. Such application scenarios require means for composing and executing complex workflows. Therefore, many efforts have been made towards the development of workflow management systems for Grid computing. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy that characterizes and classifies various approaches for building and executing workflows on Grids. We also survey several representative Grid workflow systems developed by various projects world-wide to demonstrate the comprehensiveness of the taxonomy. The taxonomy not only highlights the design and engineering similarities and differences of state-of-the-art in Grid workflow systems, but also identifies the areas that need further research.

A Taxonomy of Workflow Management Systems for Grid Computing

技術解説 IEEE Computer

Performing data management operations on replicated data in a computer network. Log entries are generated for data management operations of an application executing on a source system. Consistency point entries are used to indicate a time of a known good, or recoverable, state of the application. A destination system is configured to process a copy of the log and consistency point entries to replicate data in a replication volume, the replicated data being a copy of the application data on the source system. When the replicated data represents a known good state of the application, as determined by the consistency point entries, the destination system(s) may perform a storage operation (e.g., snapshot, backup) to copy the replicated data and to logically associate the copied data with a time information (e.g., time stamp) indicative of the source system time when the application was in the known good state.

Systems and methods for performing data replication

A system and method are provided for performing storage operations relating to a first secondary copy of electronic data. A storage policy or storage preferences may dictate that a replication copy should be used in storage operations performed to a particular client, sub-client, data, media or other item. Based on the storage policy, when a new client, sub-client, data, media or other item is received, a media agent determines whether there is a replication copy of the item. In the absence of a replication copy, one may be created. The replication copy may be provided by a third party application, or created by the client or a storage management system component. Information regarding the replication copy and its corresponding first secondary copy may be stored in a database. To optimize use of system resources, storage operations relating to the first secondary copy may be performed using the replication copy instead of the first secondary copy.

Systems and methods for performing replication copy storage operations

We evaluate the performance of checkpointing and replication schemes for the fault tolerant mobile agent system. For the quantitative comparison, we have implemented an experimental system on top of the Mole mobile agent system and also built a simulation system to include various failure cases. Our experiment aims to have the insight into the behavior of agents under two schemes and provide a guideline for the fault tolerant system design. The experimental results show that the checkpointing scheme shows a very stable performance; and for the replication scheme, some controllable system parameter values should be chosen carefully to achieve the desirable performance.

The performance of checkpointing and replication schemes for fault tolerant mobile agent systems

This paper presents an efficient recovery scheme based on checkpointing and message logging for mobile computing systems. For the efficient management of checkpoints and message logs, a movement-based scheme is proposed. Mobile hosts carrying their recovery information to the nearby mobile support station can recover instantly in case of a failure, however, the cost to transfer the recovery information must be high. On the other hand, the recovery information remaining dispersed over a number of support stations visited by mobile hosts must incur very high recovery cost. To balance the failure-free operation cost and the recovery cost, in the proposed scheme, the recovery information of a mobile host remains at the visited support stations while the host moves within a certain range. Only when the host moves out of the range, the recovery information is transferred to a nearby mobile support station. As a result, the proposed scheme can control the information transfer cost as well as the recovery cost.

An efficient recovery scheme for mobile computing environments

A number of checkpointing and message logging algorithms have been proposed to support fault tolerance of mobile computing systems. However, little attention has been paid to the optimistic message logging scheme. Optimistic logging has a lower failure-free operation cost compared to other logging schemes. It also has a lower failure recovery cost compared to the checkpointing schemes. This paper presents an efficient scheme to implement optimistic logging for the mobile computing environment. In the proposed scheme, the task of logging is assigned to the mobile support station so that volatile logging can be utilized. In addition, to reduce the message overhead, the mobile support station takes care of dependency tracking and the potential dependency between mobile hosts is inferred from the dependency between mobile support stations. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated by an extensive simulation study. The results show that the proposed scheme requires a small failure-free overhead and the cost of unnecessary rollback caused by the imprecise dependency is adjustable by properly selecting the logging frequency.

An efficient optimistic message logging scheme for recoverable mobile computing systems

This paper presents an asynchronous recovery scheme to provide fault-tolerance for mobile computing systems. The proposed scheme is based on optimistic message logging, since the checkpointing-only schemes are not suitable for the mobile environment in which unreliable mobile hosts and fragile network connection may hinder any kind of coordination for checkpointing and recovery. Also, in order to reduce the overhead imposed on mobile hosts, mobile support stations take charge of logging and dependency tracking, and mobile hosts maintain only a small amount of information for mobility tracking. As a result, truly asynchronous recovery for mobile systems can be achieved with little overhead.

An asynchronous recovery scheme based on optimistic message logging for mobile computing systems

Fault-tolerance is an essential element to the distributed system which requires the reliable computation environment. In spite of extensive researches over two decades, practical fault-tolerance systems have not been provided. It is due to the high overhead and the unhandiness of the previous fault-tolerance systems. In this paper, we propose MPICH-GF, a user-transparent checkpointing system for grid-enabled MPICH. Our objectives are to fill the gap between the theory and practice of fault-tolerance systems and to provide a checkpointing-recovery system for grids. To build a fault-tolerant MPICH version, we have designed task migration, dynamic process management for MPI and message queue management. MPICH-GF requires no modification of application source codes and affects the MPICH communication as less as possible. The features of MPICH-GF are that it supports the direct message transfer mode and that all of the implementation has been done at the lower layer, that is, the virtual device level. We have evaluated MPICH-GF with NPB applications on Globus middleware.

Taesoon Park

Papers

The performance of checkpointing and replication schemes for fault tolerant mobile agent systems

An efficient recovery scheme for mobile computing environments

An efficient optimistic message logging scheme for recoverable mobile computing systems

An asynchronous recovery scheme based on optimistic message logging for mobile computing systems

MPICH-GF: Transparent Checkpointing and Rollback-Recovery for Grid-Enabled MPI Processes